Palace and Hovel; Or, Phases of London LifeKirwan, Daniel Joseph
History
Palace and Hovel; Or, Phases of London Life
Kirwan, Daniel Joseph
London (England) -- Description and travel; London (England) -- Social life and customs
Museum, Buckingham Palace, the University College, the Nelson and York
Monuments, the splendid club houses in Pall Mall and St. James; Apsley
House and Hyde Park with its lakes of silvery water, Westminster Abbey,
the Clock and Victoria Towers surmounting the Parliament Houses which
overhang the Thames, Lambeth Palace, the residence of the Archbishop
of Canterbury, Chief Dignitary of the English State Church and Milbank
Penitentiary down in dusty Westminster, and by the way this prison with
its eight towers looks like a cruet stand and its towers certainly
represent the caster bottles. With its parterre of trees in the central
square, the quadrangles of Chelsea Hospital, and the dome of the Palm
House in Kensington Garden next come under inspection, and finally I
became weary in endeavoring to pierce the haze which the sun had broken
into annoying fragments, and failing to penetrate farther than Vauxhall
bridge, I give up the task and draw in my head after a last look at the
Catherine and West India docks, bewildered and confused by the very
immensity of wealth and population which is centered and aggregated
below, under and in the shadow of St. Paul's, the Mother Church of
Great Britain.
[Illustration: "THANK YOU, SIR."]
The verger says with a weak and wheezy voice:
"This is a werry great city, sir. They do say as how there's more nor
three millions of hooman beings in this 'ere metropolis, and how they
all gets a living is a blessed puzzle to me. I gets an occasional
sixpence, and Americans seem to be more generous than any other
visitors. Thank you, sir."
London is a wonderful city in many ways. The year 1866 brought the
number of the inhabitants to the total of 3,186,000. This is a
population larger than that of Pekin, and as large and a half as that
of London's great rival, Paris. It has a greater number of edifices
devoted to religious worship than the Eternal City, Rome. Its commerce
exceeds that of New York, Glasgow, Cork, Havre, and Bremen in gross.
It sends abroad missionaries of all known sects, to convert the
heathen and blackamoor, and for them and their wives there is a larger
amount of money collected in London than could by any possibility be
subscribed in all the other great cities of the world combined for a
like purpose. It numbers among its population more prostitutes and
unfortunate females than Paris, there being according to a calculation
made by a former bishop of Oxford, 30,000 of this wretched class,
alone, who are strictly professionals.
London has work houses to accommodate 150,000 paupers under the
parochial system, for which the residents or freeholders of every
parish in the metropolitan district are taxed at an annual rate of
fourteen pounds ten shillings per pauper, and yet men, women, and
children die of starvation, weekly, in the slums of St. Giles, Saffron
Hill, Bethnal Green, and Shoreditch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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